The Web Between the Worlds

CHAPTER 10: The Birth of Ourobouros

The city of Quito lay less than thirty miles to the south-west. From the excavation site it could no longer be seen. Immense mounds of earth and broken rock completely circled the pit, hiding all the surrounding countryside from anyone inside the lip of the crater.

The landscape had become lifeless. Nothing grew on the steep sides of the rock piles, nor in the cavernous interior of the pit with its sheer, metal-braced walls. Rob was standing about thirty meters from the edge, looking about him at the bleak, dead scene.

“I hope all this is worth it,” he said to the man standing beside him. “You’ve certainly carved the earth up here. You know we have to hit the point exactly, then hold it down when it starts to pull? Otherwise, we lose the whole thing.”

The other man was small, dark-skinned, and short of stature. He was much at home in the thin mountain air. His smile at Rob was brilliant and gap-toothed. “Not my department,” he said, with the ease of long familiarity. “Landing it in the right place is your job. Me, I just dig the holes. Come on over and take a look at the bottom of this one. She’s a big mother, biggest I’ve ever done.”

Rob allowed himself to be led to the edge of the pit. It was a little more than four hundred yards across, with an even, circular boundary. The sides were smoothly vertical. Rob took a quick look over, then stepped back.

“That’s enough for me, Luis. I’m not all that fond of heights.”

“You say?” The other man stared at Rob challengingly. “You try and tell me that, when Perrazo told me you went off climbing the Himalayas — alone? What is that, if it is not heights?”

“That’s different. I had my mind on getting up the mountain, and down again. Here, it’s all the way down in one swoop. I’ve always wondered how you could feel so comfortable, working the heights like this.” He took another quick step to look over the edge, then promptly backed up again. “It manages to look a lot deeper than five kilometers from up here. I can’t even see the excavation equipment, and they’re big machines.”

“Biggest I could find. We’ll be all ready here in a couple more months.” Luis advanced to the very edge of the pit and leaned casually over it. He nodded in satisfaction at what he saw and spat into the depths. “This is still the easy part, eh? When she comes in, and we have to get the rock back in there — that’s when we begin to sweat. She’ll be a bitch to tether. You sure you don’t have more time for me to fill her in? Couple billion tons, less than five minutes. That’s a tall order.” The confident tone of his voice belied his words as he leaned far over the edge and peered downwards.

“You’ll do it, Luis.” Rob was staring up, straight above them, as though seeing something descending in his mind’s eye. “We’ve built in a mushroom at the end of the beanstalk. It broadens out to about three hundred and fifty meters at the bottom, so you won’t have any trouble watching it arrive. It will be coming in at less than a hundred kilometers an hour on the final entry, and its arrival position will be accurate to better than one meter. You can start shovelling rock in there as soon as the leading edge goes below ground level. You’ll have loads of time. Way I look at it, I wonder why we’re paying you as much as we are — it’s like giving the money away.”

“All right.” Luis was laughing and still looking down into the pit. “Maybe you’d like to take over this job for yourself, eh? Then I can have the easy part, sit over there in Central Control and watch while other people do all the work.”

“Easy? Where do you think all the worry will be? You can sit here and be full of blind faith — I’m the one who has to worry about the stability, all the way in.”

The short man shrugged. “Stability? You calculated all that months ago. Now, you sit and watch and tell me you’ll be worrying. What will you be doing, tell me that.”

Rob sniffed. The two men had played this game many times before. “I’ll be sitting there trying to control a hundred thousand kilometers of live snake, that’s all. Not to mention the ballast, out at the far end. How’d you like it if we miss on that? You’ll get the whole thing in your lap, here at Quito.”

“Wouldn’t happen like that, would it?” Luis turned and cocked his dark head, a note of inquiry replacing the verbal sparring. His feet were inches from the lip of the excavation.

“Come away from there, Luis, and I’ll answer the question. You don’t seem to care if you fall over, but it makes me nervous.”

“You know I’m irreplaceable.”

“Bull. I’ll have no trouble getting a replacement who’s more competent — I just don’t want the bother of breaking in somebody new to run Tether Control.” Rob watched as the other man moved a couple of inches away from the edge. “You’re right, though,” he went on. “If we don’t get the ballast tied on at the other end, you won’t get the cable in here — the first time round. It will start to curl around the Earth, speeding up all the way. You’ll get it on the second sweep, and then I guarantee you’d notice it. It ought to be moving about Mach Three when it comes into the atmosphere, a couple of billion tons of it. Quito would be a lively place.”

“Siccatta! You paint nice pictures for me.” Luis spat again over the edge, turned, and walked back to join Rob by the aircar. “I suppose you told all that to the General Coordinators’ Office? What did they think of it?”

“Not my department.” Rob mimicked the other’s flat, calm delivery. “I left all that to Darius Regulo. He’s the one who handled the permits.”

“Hm. And how did he manage that?”

Rob shrugged. “I’ll have to guess. Some people he persuaded, some he bought, some owed him for past favors, some he scared more with other worries if we don’t go ahead and build the `stalk. You know how it’s done. A little carrot, a little stick. Me, I just build the cable — and she’s a big mother, too, biggest I’ve done. I’m happy to leave the manipulation of the authorities to Regulo’s fine Italian hand.”

He sat down on the stubby wing of the aircar. “We’ve got enough worries without taking on Regulo’s. Any real problems at this end? If not, we’ll keep the fabrication going and make final plans for the fly-in.”

The dark man shook his head. “I worked for you on the New Zealand Bridge, and on the Madagascar Bridge, and I’m lined up for the Tasman Bridge. All that, and you have the nerve to ask me such a question. Rob Merlin, my perfectionist friend, don’t you know me at all? Don’t you think I would have been banging your door down, long ago, if something were not going according to plan and according to schedule? Do you think I am one of those incompetent lastajas who would rather see things screwed up than admit they have troubles?”

“All right.” Rob held up his hand to cut off the flow of words. “I’m with you. I know you’ve got everything under control here, I know your work. Damn it, Luis, if I didn’t know you’d have everything running smoothly, I’d never have asked you to work on this in the first place. But you know me, too. I have to see it all for myself, and I have to ask those dumb questions. It’s part of me, the way that digging holes is part of you.”

“It is.” Luis was smiling as the two men climbed into the aircar. “I agree, it’s part of your nature.” He looked at the huge earthworks surrounding them, man-made hills of rock and rubble. “And just you stay that way,” he said softly. “Keep insisting on seeing everything for yourself. That’s the reason why Luis Merindo has worked for you four separate times. Remember, I value my life, too — even if you think that I stand a little too close to the edge. Let’s go over and look at Tether Control. We’ll be ready here when you are.”

The view from L-4 was always a surprise to visitors. It was Earth that drew the attention first, looming four times the size of the Moon. The lunar sphere appeared exactly the same size as seen from Earth, but it was the body that finally received the closer look. The markings seemed all wrong. An Earth dweller had that same invariable face planted deep in his memory, back before he could recall any coherent sights. When the familiar face was changed suddenly to an alien profile it became a new and interesting world, no longer Earth’s age-old companion. And that feeling persisted. Rob had made the trip to L-4 many times now, and was becoming accustomed to the new face in the sky. Even so, he found that he was taking an occasional look at the bright hemisphere as he rode slowly along the length of the beanstalk, heading back towards the Spider.

The load-bearing and superconducting cables, along with the elements of the drive ladder, were being extruded as a single complex unit. That was the assembly to be flown in to a landing at Tether Control. The rest — ore and passenger carriers, maintenance robots and condition sensors — would all be added later, once the beanstalk was settled in position.

There had been a slight argument with Regulo on the question of the ore carriers. He had wanted to do it in the same extrusion process, eager to see how much could be done with the Spider. He seemed to regard it as his own new toy. Rob had persuaded him that it would make the fly-in to Earth tether more complicated, even though the extrusion itself was feasible. Addition of the ore carriers would be a separate installation job, by a team ready to work up and down the length of the beanstalk itself, and it could be done in less than a month with maintenance robot assistance.

The doped silicon strands of the load-bearing cable gleamed brightly in the sunlight, a gossamer loop extending out from L-4 and far off towards the distant Earth. Rob could follow it by eye for only the first few kilometers. Beyond that, thousands of tiny sensors planted all the way along its twisting length sent frequent radio inputs to Sycorax’s orbit adjustment programs. The results of those computations were channeled through to Rob and, failing his override, initiated any necessary corrective action on the beanstalk. Small reaction motors, mobile along the length, maintained the delicate overall stability of the vast loop. Regulo had readily accepted Rob’s suggestion that they should use two Spiders, fuse the first few kilometers of cable that each extruded, and generate a long, looped strand that would halve the total time for manufacture. The maneuvers prior to fly-in would be more complicated because of that, but Rob was convinced that they were well under control.

He looked ahead. Far in front of him he could now see the bulk of the asteroid that Regulo had moved in from the Belt. Close to its surface, still invisible to him, floated the two Spiders, endless streams of bright cable squirting from their spinnerets. He was watching for them as he moved steadily closer to the asteroid, until a second small inspection craft, similar to the one that he was riding in, moved away from the shadow of the asteroid and headed in his direction.

“Corrie?”

“Right.” Her voice was clear over the head-set. “I thought I’d come out, meet you, and take a look for myself. How is the beanstalk behaving?”

“So far, as smooth as you could ask.” As Rob moved level with the second ship it turned and began to follow him along the cable. “I rode around the whole loop without seeing anything we need to worry about. There was a little oscillation and twisting at the far end, but it was being damped by the reaction motors by the time I got there. Somebody back there on Atlantis is doing a good job on the control calculations.”

“That’s all Sycorax — maybe with a little help from Caliban.”

“Are you serious? If you are, I’m going to start worrying a little. I don’t think Caliban knows anything at all about computational work.”

Corrie laughed. “I’m not sure if I’m serious or not. Sycorax has become so complicated that not even Regulo and Morel know any longer who is doing what. There are non-deterministic elements built into the computer, and there are real-time linkages built in to the relations between Sycorax and Caliban. They even put in quantum randomizers — that was Regulo’s idea — as part of Sycorax’s circuits, to add a heuristic element to some of the optimization algorithms. One of the other circuits reads in radio noise from the stellar background and makes it available as a computer input. According to Regulo, every now and again Sycorax will have the equivalent of a `wild thought.’ I’m giving you a long answer, but it’s another way of saying that your guess is as good as mine or anyone else’s. Nobody except Sycorax could ever tell you just where and how those stability calculations are done in the system — and Sycorax doesn’t care to tell.”

They were flying in closer to the Spiders. Rob felt no real need to check their operations, but he was always happy just to watch them. It was his first real invention, and the one that most pleased him.

The two great ovoid bodies were hanging near the surface of the asteroid, about a hundred meters apart. The eight thin metallic legs were pointed downwards, balanced delicately a few centimeters clear of the surface. Between them, probing deep into the interior of the asteroid, was set the long proboscis. As Rob watched, the great, faceted eyes turned towards him. The Spiders were aware of his presence. Somewhere deep in their organic components lurked a hint of consciousness.

Corrie had been fascinated by them from the first moment she saw one. “Why eight legs?” she had asked.

Rob had shrugged. “It extrudes material like a spider. How many legs would you have given it?”

The changes to the Spiders to speed up the extrusion process had been made quickly, and had given Rob and Darius Regulo their first surprise. The material supply rate that would be needed to keep the Spiders running at full speed was more than either had expected. Conventional asteroid mining methods would fall behind their demand. The raw materials were there in abundance, silicon for the load-bearing cable, niobium and aluminum for the superconducting cables and the drive mechanisms. Getting it out fast enough was another matter.

It had been a problem, until Rob placed an urgent call to Rudy Chernick and asked if there were any way to modify a Coal Mole to work on different materials and in a vacuum environment. A lot of technical discussion, even more hard negotiation between Chernick and Regulo, and the beanstalk project had acquired another working partner. Now a whole family of modified Moles was chewing away happily in the bowels of the asteroid, gobbling up its interior and spitting millions of tons a day of raw materials out through the chutes that connected to each Spider’s waiting proboscis.

Rob had been inside the asteroid only once, when Chernick was taking in a supply of nutrients. Not even the Moles’ extraordinary metabolism could survive on what the rocky interior would provide for them. Rob had quickly become bewildered and disoriented by the honeycomb of tunnels running throughout the three-kilometer planetoid.

“How do you know where all the Moles are, and who’s mining what?” he asked Chernick, who seemed remarkably at home in the warren of connecting passages.

The other man was tall and skeletally thin, with mournful eyes and a long, drooping moustache. He sniggered happily. “I don’t have the slightest idea.” He looked at Rob slyly. “You’re the one who gave me the idea of using the happiness circuits. I bet mine are almost the same as the ones that you have in the Spiders. The Moles enjoy planning the diggings — I wouldn’t take their pleasures from them. I give them the mining specifications on quantities and rates, and leave the rest to them. Perfectly straightforward — not like those monsters you’ve got outside there.” He peered back along the tunnel at the chute leading to one Spider’s proboscis. “How many of those things do you have? They’re uncanny.”

“Five full-sized ones, and we’re growing the bio component for three more. I just placed the orders for the electronics on them. I’ve got one down on Earth, these two here, and a couple more on loan to Regulo. He has Sala Keino using them out near Atlantis.”

“Atlantis?” Chernick turned his long, inquisitive nose in Rob’s direction. “What does he want with one out there?”

“I’ll tell you when he tells me. He’s being cute about it. All he’ll admit is that it’s a new way of mining.” It was Rob’s turn to look sly. “If I were you, Rudy, I’d begin worrying. You know Regulo’s reputation — suppose he’s making the Moles obsolete?”

Chernick shrugged and chewed at his moustache. “I know Regulo’s reputation. That’s why I’m not worried. He’s not interested in anything that works down on Earth. My Moles are safe enough.” But despite his confident words, he seemed to have a lot on his mind as they made their way to the ship that would carry him back to the Colony. An intelligent man could quickly see the ways in which a working beanstalk would reduce the effective distance between Earth and sky industries.

That had been back in the first days of production. Events since then had done nothing to make Rudy Chernick feel more comfortable. Things were running along fast, although after the first shake-down period, with well over a thousand kilometers of cable extruded, Rob had insisted on throwing all the product away and beginning the extrusion again. His act had baffled everyone but Regulo. The old man had laughed his grating laugh and nodded his head approvingly when Corrie called and told him about it.

“Exactly the right thing to do,” he said. “I just don’t know how Merlin got smart so quick. He’s a young man, but he really understands the difference between transients and steady-state solutions.”

“Do you mean the first batch of cable was no good?”

“Oh, it was probably all right — almost certainly all right. But there’s a chance that the specs were off a teeny bit in that first shake-down period. Merlin waited until all the production was smooth, then he started over knowing there was nothing peculiar left over from the time before everything settled down. It’s just what I’d do myself — only I’m not sure I’d have had the sense to do it at his age. They’re getting too good too soon these days.” He shook his gnarled head. “Good thing I’ve given up on the technical side.”

Perhaps. But Regulo examined the production reports daily, and detailed design plans for the beanstalk were scattered all over the big study in Atlantis.

Rob had no illusions about the extent of Regulo’s involvement and interest. He never hesitated to call the other man at once when there was a knotty engineering problem. Every time, there would be a few seconds of grumbling about doing another man’s work for him — what did Rob think he was being paid for? Then those bright old eyes would light up with interest, the computer was linked into the two-way conversation, and any other problems through the vast network of Regulo Enterprises were put on hold until he and Rob had thrashed out some kind of answer.

“Now, don’t call me again unless it’s a financial matter,” he said, every time, as he cut the circuit. Rob politely agreed, and kept his grin to himself until the video link had been switched off.

With seventy thousand kilometers of beanstalk ready, those conversations were less frequent. Anything that went wrong now would be too serious for a mere discussion to fix. Rob fretted constantly over the extrusion rate of the Spiders, checking that it did not change by the tiniest fraction.

“Why do you worry about that so much?” asked Corrie, as they docked their inspection ships at the main crew station and removed their suits. “Does it matter if they slow down or speed up a little?”

“It would be fatal.” Rob looked out along the great length of the cable. “Do you realize how much momentum that thing has? The mass is already over a billion tons, and it’s all moving steadily away from here at the same speed that the Spiders extrude the cable. If they try and slow down or speed up a bit, they have a billion tons of inertia that doesn’t want to go along with that idea. The force would pull the Spiders off the asteroid and separate them from the raw materials — and you can imagine what that would do to our schedules. Regulo would be breathing down my neck, instead of being out of the way in Atlantis.”

Corrie nodded. “Have you called him in the past couple of days? Last time we spoke he told me that he had some news for you.”

Rob was standing next to her in the fifth of a gee provided by the rotating station. Looking at her, he marvelled again how he could have been so blind. She was Senta’s daughter. The coloring was different, and Corrie’s figure was much slimmer — but look at the bone structure of those cheeks. Look at the line of her neck. It was Senta exactly.

What about the eyes, though, those clear, bright eyes? They, surely, had come from somewhere else. They matched the frosty blue of Darius Regulo, but Rob could go no farther than that. He had looked hard at Corrie after Senta’s assertion. Regulo’s ruined face made the comparison of their features an impossible task.

Most of the time, while Rob was busy night and day on beanstalk construction, Corrie had been away on Atlantis. At their infrequent meetings, he always intended to ask Corrie about her father. Each time, he had failed to go through with it.

Suppose Corrie didn’t want it known that Regulo was her father? There were good reasons for that. She did her job efficiently, but her life would become more complicated if anyone in Regulo Enterprises knew that she was the boss’s daughter. No matter what she did it would be discounted, credited to family rather than talent.

Rob dithered, something unknown to him in his technical work. And he had never managed to ask his question.

“Well, aren’t you interested in knowing what Regulo has for you?” asked Corrie. She was staring hard at Rob, with the crackling blue eyes that had started his train of thought.

“I’m sorry.” Rob pulled his attention back to present problems. “I was miles away. Of course I want to know what Regulo is doing. What did he tell you?”

Corrie laughed. “You were miles away — as usual. You’ve not been listening to me at all. I just told you he wouldn’t tell me what he wants, or what his news is. You’ll have to call him yourself. I’d like to sit in when you do, though. I think there’s something new in the air. I’ve learned to tell when Regulo is excited.”

“Will he talk, do you think, with both of us at this end?”

“I don’t think he’ll actually talk to either of us. Not on two-way. The delay times are getting longer, and he’s impatient. Last time there was a round-trip signal time of nearly forty seconds, and he hated that.” Corrie was leading the way through the crew station towards the communications room. “He’s still moving Atlantis farther out from the Sun. I think all we’ll get is a recorded message with your code I.D. on it.”

They entered the shielded booth, a tight squeeze for two people, and Rob keyed in his personal print. After a second or two the screen lit up and Regulo appeared on it.

“You’re right,” Rob said. “Time’s too short for a transmission to Atlantis and back. All we’ll get is a canned message.” He turned up the volume and leaned closer to the small screen.

“I’ve been watching your progress,” began Regulo without preamble. There was a metallic edge of impatience in his gruff voice. “You’re still ahead of schedule, and so far as I can tell there’s nothing for you in the next couple of days that can’t be delegated. Don’t say it, I know you’re busy as hell. But I’ve watched your crews work, and they are all first-rate. Before things get too close to completion, I want you to come to Atlantis.”

He grinned, easing the impression of hard command. “I promise you, it won’t be a waste of your time. We have the mining project to the point where I want to talk to you about it, and maybe show you a few things. I guarantee that they’ll interest you. There’ll be plenty of time when we are finished here for you to get back to L-4 and work on the fly-in and tether. You know that I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize that. But I want to get some other business out of the way before we move Atlantis out to the Belt.”

Regulo paused for a few seconds as though looking and listening to something just off-screen. He nodded and reached forward to press two keys on the desk control panel. “Don’t bother to call and try to discuss this,” he said, returning his attention to the screen. “Just let me know when you’ll be here, and tell me if you have any problem making it soon. I have our fastest ship on stand-by near L-4. Bring Cornelia with you if she wants to come.” He grinned. “Will you take a bet with me that she’s not sitting there right now, listening? See you soon.”

The screen went blank. Rob looked at Corrie and shrugged. “That’s Regulo. Short and sweet. He’s in a hurry, as usual. I think he suspects he’ll get me there a lot quicker if he arouses my curiosity and won’t tell me what he has in his back pocket. I want to send him a message anyhow. Would you tell him that I’ll be on my way in six hours? There are a few things to take care of here, and I have to talk to the tether crew back on Earth.”

“We’ll be on our way in six hours,” she corrected him. “You heard Regulo. He’s expecting both of us, and don’t think you can leave me here after hearing him dangle a bait like that. I’ll send your message, but I’ll have to move fast, too. I’ve been trying to clear another of Regulo’s permits through the Earth system. I’m feeling the same way about the Earth government and the United Space Federation as Regulo does — sick to death of them. He always says that ninety-nine percent of the people on Earth aren’t worth keeping alive, but evolution will take care of that. I finally think I know how it will go. Earth won’t choke on pollution, or starve for lack of resources. It will drown in its own bureaucracy.”

She left quickly, while Rob was still smiling at her brisk evaluation. Corrie wasn’t a woman with much time for incompetence, in organizations or in individuals. Rob had seen enough red tape in his construction projects to know how irritating the bureaucrats could be to anybody whose focus was on results rather than procedures. Corrie was even less tolerant. Sometimes he had the feeling that she regarded him as just another of the assets of Regulo Enterprises, to be managed as efficiently as possible. That could mean charming, or cajoling, or persuading through logic. Corrie had all the tools in her locker, and it seemed to be partly hereditary. Rob had seen Senta working the same combination on Howard Anson.

That last thought produced a twinge of conscience. A call from Rob to Anson was badly overdue. When the beanstalk demanded it, everything else in Rob’s life was pushed into the background. And the problems had been coming thick and fast in the past few weeks. But Rob had better make the call from here, rather than waiting until they were out on Atlantis. With Regulo and Joseph Morel in a position to tap all incoming and outgoing calls there, privacy of conversation couldn’t be guaranteed.

Pushing fatigue to the back of his mind, Rob reached again for the communicator.